Brexit – A cure for political deafness?

June 27, 2016

“It’s not immigration you old crow, it’s a bloody invasion!”

So said a visiting British woman in mid-May, killing time in the TV section while waiting for her daughter-in-law to get off work at Wal-Mart. She was responding to something she had just heard Hillary Clinton say about increasing the immigration rates for “refugees.”

Assured that she had a perfect right to express her opinion, she said that it just made her mad when politicians anywhere tried to paint any opposition to unfettered immigration as hatred of Muslims.

Apparently it isn’t just U.S. politicians that develop occupational-related deafness, according to her.

“No one even listens when we try to explain what’s happening. It’s as though they have no ears.” she said.

She felt there were too many people coming in far too quickly for the already stretched government services to care for them, and she believes immigrants are given preference for already scarce medical resources over needy citizens.

Reporting by the BBC would tend to support her conclusion, with total net migration (inbound minus outbound immigrants) topping 330,000 in 2015 (vs. about 95,000 in 2000), and 2016 on a pace to be at or above that figure.

(This mirrors the trend line of U.S. net immigration figures, which forecasts that in just 6 years and absent any modifying factors, one-seventh or nearly 15% of the U.S. population will not be native-born, the highest level ever.)

She noted that many never learn English if they didn’t speak it already, and too many “live together in groups ” and repel any attempt to bring them into mainstream British society.

What particularly outraged her was that the EU politicians “…call us racist and say we just hate everyone who doesn’t look like us, as though that’s all it’s about.”

She went on to explain that immigration was only a part of why Britain was about to vote to leave the EU.

Asked about Brexit, she left nothing to the imagination about what she thought of being ruled by people in Belgium, calling her parliament “nothing but a rubber stamp for the EU.”

Her view was that the EU benefits no one but the ministers and officials at the expense of “the working folk.” She told of falling standards of living, more violence, higher prices, and silly regulations.

Gee, where have we heard that before?

Asked if she thought Brexit would pass, she smiled and said she thought that the politicians would soon know that no one was buying their ridiculous tosh (nonsense to us).

Her daughter-in-law came just then and they left, but it wasn’t hard to believe at that moment that Britain might vote to leave.

I thought of her Thursday evening, imagining her saying “Have you heard us now?”

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